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If somehow a technology is developed to allow local storage cost to drop by a factor of 10, don't you think S3 would make use of the same technology to stay com

If somehow a technology is developed to allow local storage cost to drop by a factor of 10, don't you think S3 would make use of the same technology to stay competitive? Cloud storage is a commodity these days. The market saves you in this case -- if one cloud provider didn't use the 10x technology and pass along the 10x savings to the customer, another company would do it and steal all of their customers.

brianwawok 10y ago
I am not sure. Has AWS bandwidth followed the general bandwidth drop that everyone else has seen? If migrating out of AWS is 100 million dollars in bandwidth, not sure you would see a lot of people jump ship to a competitor.. data lockin and all.
- gamegoblin 10y ago
  If you are at that scale, it would probably be faster and cheaper to evacuate data on physical media rather than over the network. I believe one can use Snowball to do this: https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/#export https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/#export
adrianN 10y ago
You'd still need to get your data out of Amazon's cloud and into the competitor's. That's neither cheap nor easy.
- gamegoblin 10y ago
  My point is that all cloud competitors would necessarily switch for economic reasons. If not to keep you from leaving, then to keep a competitor from capturing all new growth.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Thats not how it works. People still use IBM mainframes, despite linux being 10x cheaper or more. If you got locked in sometimes you get locked in. Many AWS services have no easy migration path off it.
    - gamegoblin 10y ago
      That's absolutely how it works. If a 10x cost reduction storage technology comes along, cloud providers will necessarily adopt it and will reduce their prices by approximately 10x. Here's why: - If they don't, it will become more cost effective for potential customers to run their own datacenters rather than put data into the cloud, so their growth will basically stop. - Even if potential customers don't want to run their own datacenters, both potential and existing customers will put new data to a competitor who did pass along the 10x savings to the customer. So again, their growth will basically stop. This is the nature of a commodity product in a free market. Basically all cloud providers use an S3-compatible API, and costs and performance are in the same ballpark. There are tons of open source compatibility layers that abstract which provider you are putting to. If one of them starts costing 10x less, you just flip the switch and all new data goes there. The ability for customers to completely cut off growth of their service if prices don't fall is a supreme motivator. The only case this wouldn't be true is if all of the cloud storage services formed a cartel to fix prices. But given that every time Google or Amazon lowers prices, the other one follows to maintain parity, we have evidence that that isn't the case. Addendum: I don't understand your analogy at all. IBM mainframes are a specific type of hardware that excel at highly available batch and transactional processing. Linux is an operating system. Linux is free, so it's infinitely cheaper. Also, IBM mainframes run Linux.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        > If a 10x cost reduction storage technology comes along, cloud providers will necessarily adopt it and will reduce their prices by approximately 10x. Here are my two counterpoints. 1) Bandwidth prices HAVE fallen 10x in the past N years. Many cloud providers (ovh, etc) DO offer this price drop. Yet how many people really left AWS or GCE for ovh? I would guess not that many. 2) As I said with mainframes.. there is a 10x cheaper option to a mainframe that has been around for oh 15 years. But people are still on them, BECAUSE they are still locked in to them. That is my point. Don't get locked into a single anything. Sending 100 PB data for a commercial entity to hold for you, with no guarantees of future pricing, is a bad move. Locking yourself in is one of the worst things you can do as a company.

brianwawok 10y ago

I am not sure. Has AWS bandwidth followed the general bandwidth drop that everyone else has seen? If migrating out of AWS is 100 million dollars in bandwidth, not sure you would see a lot of people jump ship to a competitor.. data lockin and all.

gamegoblin 10y ago
If you are at that scale, it would probably be faster and cheaper to evacuate data on physical media rather than over the network. I believe one can use Snowball to do this: https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/#export https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/faqs/#export

adrianN 10y ago

You'd still need to get your data out of Amazon's cloud and into the competitor's. That's neither cheap nor easy.

gamegoblin 10y ago
My point is that all cloud competitors would necessarily switch for economic reasons. If not to keep you from leaving, then to keep a competitor from capturing all new growth.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Thats not how it works. People still use IBM mainframes, despite linux being 10x cheaper or more. If you got locked in sometimes you get locked in. Many AWS services have no easy migration path off it.
  - gamegoblin 10y ago
    That's absolutely how it works. If a 10x cost reduction storage technology comes along, cloud providers will necessarily adopt it and will reduce their prices by approximately 10x. Here's why: - If they don't, it will become more cost effective for potential customers to run their own datacenters rather than put data into the cloud, so their growth will basically stop. - Even if potential customers don't want to run their own datacenters, both potential and existing customers will put new data to a competitor who did pass along the 10x savings to the customer. So again, their growth will basically stop. This is the nature of a commodity product in a free market. Basically all cloud providers use an S3-compatible API, and costs and performance are in the same ballpark. There are tons of open source compatibility layers that abstract which provider you are putting to. If one of them starts costing 10x less, you just flip the switch and all new data goes there. The ability for customers to completely cut off growth of their service if prices don't fall is a supreme motivator. The only case this wouldn't be true is if all of the cloud storage services formed a cartel to fix prices. But given that every time Google or Amazon lowers prices, the other one follows to maintain parity, we have evidence that that isn't the case. Addendum: I don't understand your analogy at all. IBM mainframes are a specific type of hardware that excel at highly available batch and transactional processing. Linux is an operating system. Linux is free, so it's infinitely cheaper. Also, IBM mainframes run Linux.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      > If a 10x cost reduction storage technology comes along, cloud providers will necessarily adopt it and will reduce their prices by approximately 10x. Here are my two counterpoints. 1) Bandwidth prices HAVE fallen 10x in the past N years. Many cloud providers (ovh, etc) DO offer this price drop. Yet how many people really left AWS or GCE for ovh? I would guess not that many. 2) As I said with mainframes.. there is a 10x cheaper option to a mainframe that has been around for oh 15 years. But people are still on them, BECAUSE they are still locked in to them. That is my point. Don't get locked into a single anything. Sending 100 PB data for a commercial entity to hold for you, with no guarantees of future pricing, is a bad move. Locking yourself in is one of the worst things you can do as a company.